


a terrible boy, an awful situation, blue eyes, and the ocean

by penceyprat



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: M/M, also he's a Rich Boy TM, anyway they hook up but it's more sentimental than that, dan breaks up with his ex and runs away to an island in the mediterranean, dan is angsty as all shit, dan reflects and comes to terms with who he is and what he's running away from, got that family holiday villa to get drunk in, phil helps him with that, phil works in a lil bar on the beach, they hook up but with feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-28
Updated: 2018-03-28
Packaged: 2019-04-14 02:33:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14126202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/penceyprat/pseuds/penceyprat
Summary: It’s a Sunday evening. He finds a bar draped in neon lights on the beachfront. It’s cheap in its decor, but overpriced in its drinks. There’s a cute boy behind the bar. His hair is damp and he smells like ocean. The dark tips are curling up at the ends. Dan falls in love with falling.-“Would you mind getting over him?” Phil asks, his voice is soft, like stardust against Dan’s skin. He’s comfortable. Too comfortable for sense it seems.Dan laughs, and leans back against the rocks. Phil steadies him with his arms so he doesn’t slip. He doesn’t pull his arm away from around Dan’s waist. Dan doesn’t ask him to.“Would I mind?” He laughs again, but softly, carefully, and only with his mouth. Because suddenly everything’s about mouths, about lips, about drowning in the fucking ocean and learning how to breathe underwater. “I’d fucking love to.”





	a terrible boy, an awful situation, blue eyes, and the ocean

Dan stretches his arms out over the balcony and feels the sea air on his skin. He’s travelled across the continent, and still he can’t get far enough away. He’s left a boy behind, back home in England. A boy who didn’t like him very much. A boy who he liked too much. Because nothing in the world is ever fair.

His mouth tastes sour. It is a Sunday afternoon. He isn’t quite as in love with the world as he used to be. He isn’t quite himself.

Dan repeats the word ‘liked’ to himself. Past tense. Like it will make any difference. Like he can spend a month in the island sun and erase the scars and bruises on his mind. Like he can erase the first boy he gave his heart to. Like he can erase the way that boy tore it all to pieces. Like he can erase the fact that he even likes boys at all.

Because he does.

Dan likes boys, and boys like Dan. Some of them have to, at least. He wonders how far he has to run, how far he has to travel, until he can learn how to be okay with that fact.

His family’s holiday villa in the Mediterranean is all white walls, bleached by the sun, large open rooms, unused furniture, and a swimming pool out front. He’s alone and his family’s money means nothing to him anymore. It isn’t his to own. He has nothing.

He has a credit card. He has scars. He has memories. But he has nothing he can hold in his hand and _own._

He has that credit card. Scars. Memories. Sunday afternoon. Ocean front villa. Sour taste on his tongue. He is nineteen years old. Too young and too old all at once. He left without saying goodbye. He wishes he could worry that someone might come after him.

He supposes, of course, that if there was someone to come after him, he wouldn’t have come here at all. He wouldn’t have run, if there was someone to catch him. Because he’s always been scared. That’s the bottom line — Dan’s terrified.

His mouth tastes sweet. 

It’s a Sunday evening. He finds a bar draped in neon lights on the beachfront. It’s cheap in its decor, but overpriced in its drinks. There’s a cute boy behind the bar. His hair is damp and he smells like ocean. The dark tips are curling up at the ends. Dan falls in love with falling.

He orders himself a second cocktail. It’s neon pink. It’s the least manly thing, because he thinks fuck. He thinks fuck you masculinity, and fuck you every boy in school that ever told him what and who to love. He’d found a bottle of wine in one of the cupboards back at the villa. He was drunk before he even left the house. Bad decisions are always the ones he has the most fun making.

Dan likes to pretend he isn’t alone. He’s human after all. He’s human in a way this place isn’t. It’s a well-known tourist destination, smothered senseless with American party girls and lads trying to pull a waitress or a barmaid that doesn’t even speak their language. And rich, drunk, fucked up kids like him, too.

The boy behind the bar, with the dark hair descending down into damp curls, and sea blue eyes — the pretty boy behind the bar — pours him another cocktail. Dan doesn’t even remember asking for this one. He tries not to look too sad. He tries not to look too drunk. But nothing’s working for him at all.

He thinks about wandering down to the beach, about drowning himself in the ocean, about floating on his back with all of his clothes on, and letting the ocean carry him away. He’s too drunk. But there’s no undoing it now. It’s just another mistake. He knows how to make mistakes, but not how to undo them.

The boy behind the bar smiles at him. Maybe it’s a pity smile, but it doesn’t feel like it. Maybe Dan wants it to be a pity smile, so he doesn’t have to think about what else it could be.

“You don’t look happy.” The boy tells him, bluntly. It feels like the hangover to come in the morning, like a stab through the gut, like the blinding sun forcing his eyes open when all he wants to do is sleep.

Dan’s cheeks burn up. He is another fire, left out to burn out and die. He remembers a boy back in England and his pretty, bruised knuckles. He remembers every mistake ever made in his life, but nothing feels like this.

“My boyfriend left me.” Dan speaks before he can stop himself. It’s the alcohol bringing his tongue between his teeth, rendering it too slippery to hold taut against the roof of his mouth. “Well he was never really my boyfriend, just a guy. But he mattered. And he left me. Fuck. He left me. He really fucking left me.”

The boy tilts his head to one side. Dan doesn’t try to read his expression. He doubts he’ll get very far either way.

“Was he supposed to meet you here?”

This time, Dan listens to the boy’s voice as he speaks. It’s English, northern, but still, it sounds like home. Dan closes his eyes and paints himself a fantasy.

He opens them again. He feels the weight of the boy’s eyes watching him. A question lingers, unanswered, heavy in the air between them, like conversation is a puzzle they just can’t solve.

“No.” Dan spits out a response. He’s ungraceful about it, but it is, after all, an ugly truth. “He left me in England, so I came here. I came here to get away from him.” Dan says it straight for the first time.

“You went pretty far.” The boy frowns at him, pausing for a moment to make someone else’s drink. Dan watches his hands as he works, paying little attention to the cocktail he’s making, and much more to the bulging of his knuckles and the slender tips of his fingers.

“Was it bad?” He asks again, tuning back into their conversation, smiling briefly at strangers behind him. Dan wonders when he might get off his shift. Dan wonders whether he might like boys. Dan wonders whether he might like him. Dan wonders whether he might just be everything he’s been looking for. Fuck. His hands are stained with love drunk fantasy, spilled out of his head through his nose and mouth.

“What?” Dan stammers, having lost the train of conversation completely.

The boy laughs at him. His laughter’s beautiful, spraying red rose petals onto his cheeks, staining his face almost permanently. Embarrassment is a hard pill to swallow. Dan thinks about asking for another drink. For another excuse.

He looks up, and the boy’s smiling at him.

“The break up.” He prompts him. “Was it bad? Was that why you had to come this far?”

Dan still stares at him, lazy, silent, like the afternoon sun.

The boy laughs again. “You’re _so_ drunk.”

“I’m in a bar.” Dan retorts. “I didn’t come here to be sober.”

“No.” His smile fades a little. “You came here to be sad. I think.”

Dan shivers. His truth cuts a little too deep. He feels sick, washed up, like the ocean. He thinks about going home. He doesn’t know where home is anymore.

“My name’s Phil.” The boy behind the bar says.

Dan looks at him, like he’s seeing him for the first time, like he’s a painting brought to life, like he’s nothing but the alcohol talking, and maybe that’s a good thing. Dan doesn’t think he can trust himself with a real, live human being.

“I’m not sad.” He says, voice laced with anger. He can’t hear how loud he’s speaking, but Phil’s face pales white. Heads turn. He needs to leave. He wishes it could be just the alcohol speaking.

“I don’t—“ Phil stumbles with his words, trying to make sense, trying to make peace, with a terrible boy, and an awful situation. He doesn’t get very far. Dan doesn’t let him. He thinks only of blue eyes and the ocean.

Dan leaves the bar and falls onto his knees on the beach, where the sand is wet and soft beneath his feet. He gets sand on his knees, but the tide washes it away, leaving and coming back again, like the only promise in the world sure to be kept. He doesn’t want to leave, but the air is cold, and there’s a boy in a bar that’s sure to come looking for him if he can slip away for long enough. Dan doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want to be found.

Dan stumbles up the hill to the villa, keeping his back turned until the bar is nothing more than a spec of neon light on the horizon. He makes himself a promise that he’ll never go back there. The truth is that he’s scared of what he might do or say to the boy with the pretty eyes. _Phil._ He has a name. He’s real.

Dan swallows. His lungs taste like salt.

He wakes up with a hangover. He keeps his eyes screwed shut for hours as he lies in bed and listens to the ocean. The tide keeps coming back. Back for him, alone. He lets himself believe he’s the only person in the entire world. Sometimes he feels like it.

He drags himself out of bed at two in the afternoon and doesn’t think about going home, back to England, at least. He makes himself a coffee in the fancy machine; it’s too high-tech and complicated for what it’s worth, and no use in disguising the fact that the coffee itself still tastes like shit.

Dan pours his fancy coffee down the fancy sink, and runs the fancy tap, watching the plain fucking water pour against the aluminium basin, merciless in its flow, until all of the coffee is purged down the drain. Gotten rid of, like a sickness. Dan wishes he could turn a tap on in his mind and do the same thing. He looks at the beers at the back of the fridge. And last night crawls at his skin.

He sits himself down in front of the TV with a glass of water that he doesn’t drink. The channel is on in Spanish, he thinks. Spanish or Portuguese. Spanish or Portuguese or French. In his ears, in his pounding head, they all sound the same.

He pulls out his phone, and rests it on the coffee table to charge. He’d let it die on the plane ride here. He doesn’t know what his parents will have had to say about all of this, about running away. In the end, he decides he doesn’t want to know, and keeps his phone on airplane mode, clearing all of his previous notifications.

His mouth tastes dry. He wonders what he’s going to do with himself. Sit and stare at the TV screen. Stand on the balcony and stare out at the ocean. He’s a cassette tape, jammed and broken.

He floats in the pool on his back, staring at the back of his eyelids. As apathetic as he wants to be about everything, he can’t help but worry about being blinded by the sun. He can hear a muffled sound from the villa, and supposes he left the TV on. He doesn’t mind; the noise sounds like company.

In the end, the sun only makes his hangover worse. He retreats back inside, but he can’t stand the noise of the TV anymore, and he can’t find the remote, and he can’t bear all of his parents’ empty, expensive possessions watching him as if they all have eyes, and minds to judge him with.

He runs out to the balcony and watches the ocean again. There’s a bar out on the beach. The neon lights are subdued by the sun. Maybe it’s even closed in the afternoon. Maybe it’s a different place by day. There won’t be the same boy behind the bar — Dan is brave enough to call that one a certainty. And he wants to drink again almost as much as he wants to die.

So he goes. He pulls on a shirt. Fresh clothes. He doesn’t straighten his hair. He feels as much a mess as it is. And fate finds him.

His mouth tastes sweet. Too sweet. The girl behind the bar can’t make cocktails like Phil can. His name feels cursed upon his lips. 

He downs the thing. The disgusting, sugary sweet drink. It feels like bleach when it rolls down the back of his throat; Dan almost wishes it would kill him. He’s aware he’s being melodramatic about things, but he can only hope that it’s the alcohol talking, taking centre stage before he can stop it. He doesn’t want to be in control of this body at all.

“Hanna.” The girl behind the bar says when he asks her name. 

“Without the H.” She adds, like it matters. And maybe she makes it matter, just for the moment, with her pretty eyelashes, and face pulled up into a smile. 

She reminds Dan of his mother, when she was younger, and poorer, and more human, like in all of his old photographs. The ones she doesn’t know he has. He has too many secrets; he barely knows where to keep them anymore.

“Dan.” He tells her back, after too long has passed in-between. He isn’t even sure she’s listening anymore; the bar is relatively empty, with most people out in the sun, playing in the waves, but still, she’s making someone else a drink.

“How long are you here for?” She asks him, making casual conversation, but never looking at him.

“Forever. Maybe.” Dan looks down into his drink.

Hanna — _without the H_ — laughs. Dan isn’t sure whether he’s joking. He guesses that’s a puzzle he’s going to have to unravel eventually.

“Okay,” She coats her lips with laughter. It catches the light. She looks beautiful the way girls in magazines do. He wonders what she’s doing here, being beautiful behind a bar on a party beach, when there’s a whole world out there for her to see. 

She’s scared like him. The realisation creeps in like the tide. He wonders what secrets she might be keeping. He wonders if it would be a bad idea to let himself find out. He wishes that bad ideas wouldn’t excite him so desperately.

“Okay, Dan who’s staying here forever. Forever Dan— my shift ends in like five minutes.” It’s a proposition, it’s an easy smile, it’s a happy, human girl in an old photograph, dolled up in lipstick and neon lights. He can only stare at her.

Dan’s stomach plummets. He’s not drunk enough. He’s thinking too quickly. He supposes that’s the only way for thoughts to exist.

“Do you want to go get a drink?” She blushes. She stammers. “Well, you already have a drink, but at like, somewhere nice, not this little shitty place on the beach.”

“I like this little shitty place on the beach.” Dan says, before he can stop himself, before he can’t think about anything.

She smiles, out of habit, before she turns out the truth into a frown. “So you’re staying?” Her face pales. She turns. Dan’s good at breaking hearts. It’s something he does without thinking. He’s learned from the best.

He wants to apologise, but the cocktail’s hitting his head all fuzzy, and then there’s a shadow behind him, and his mind’s a conveyor belt of excuses, and she’s letting the next bartender onto their shift, and they’re squeezing past each other to get out and behind the bar, because this place is so cramped and tiny and awful, and Dan doesn’t know why he likes it at all, or why he even said that, or why he even says anything, or why he speaks at all, and then he sees the new bartender taking Hanna (without the H)’s place, like she was never there at all, and it’s, and it’s him. It’s Phil. Phil’s staring at him.

“Sorry about last night.” He says, flustered, broken, beautiful. Dan doesn’t know whether he wants to kiss or kill him. Maybe both. God, nothing about this is normal. He doesn’t even know if he wants to be normal anymore.

“I didn’t mean to call you sad.” He says again. And Hanna is probably out of the door, a hundred thousand miles away, in a photograph somewhere, at the back of a drawer, and Dan wishes he could be sorry. For someone, for anyone, for anything.

“I just mean it like…” Phil keeps talking, even when Dan’s silent, because he’s so desperate to make conversation. Dan doesn’t want to know what that means. Maybe he just pities him. Dan doesn’t want to be pitied. Fuck, maybe he does.

“You looked sort of lonely.” Phil works at a smile, like a school project, like a charity case, like he cares too much to know what’s good for him. Dan looks at him and wonders what a boy like this is doing behind this kind of bar on this kind of an island. He wonders what anyone’s really doing here. He wonders what he’s really doing here himself.

So he asks Phil outright. Because Dan has always had such a terrible way with words, and he thinks if he digs himself a hole any deeper he might just reach the centre of the earth, and he thinks at least that might be an adventure.

“What are you doing here?” God, it comes out wrong. Of course, it comes out wrong.

Phil frowns at him. “I work here?”

“No, not like that.” Dan stammers, blushes, twists his heart into a knot and throws it out into the ocean like a hand grenade. He thinks about the ash it will leave behind when it explodes at the bottom of the ocean.

“Then what?” Phil’s smiling at him. He has no fucking business smiling at him. Dan wants to tell him that. But he thinks it’s the drink speaking. He thinks it’s his head drunk at five in the afternoon speaking. He thinks he’s on a downwards spiral, but he’s clinging on for the ride.

“On this island, working behind a bar.” He explains. “How did you end up here?” Dan feels wrong asking, but he feels wrong in everything else he’s doing, so he supposes it makes no difference.

“Summer job.” Phil smiles. It’s an easy truth. It’s an easy world when you have no secrets. “Gap year.”

Dan thinks he wants to drown in him. He doesn’t think about what that means. He can’t. He doesn’t want to. All lies lead back to the same truth anyway.

“How long are you staying?” Phil asks him, eyes kept down, almost like he’s scared of the answer. Dan’s stomach twists.

“Forever, maybe less.” He looks down into his drink. He wants to remember how it felt being sober, but it comes in waves, like such a bad feeling. He supposes he has to unlearn how to be himself.

“Can you really not face going back home?” And Phil’s _definitely_ smiling like he pities him.

“I never said that.” Dan scowls. He chews at the inside of his cheeks.

“No.” Phil leans over the bar, closer to him, like there’s no distance left in the world to push the two of them far enough apart. “But you meant it.”

Dan catches his eye. Phil’s reeled him in with a smile, and he’s lost his head completely.

His mouth tastes like ocean. It’s midnight. He’s sat out on the rocks overlooking the shore. _They’re_ sat out on the rocks. Because Phil knows this island and all of its quiet spots. Phil knows how to get him alone, and Dan lets him.

“Are you trying to get over your ex?” Phil asks him. He’s a little tipsy, and Dan thinks he is too. Waned off enough not to be drunk, but he’s certain he’s not quite sober. He doesn’t think he would have let Phil take him out here sober. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Dan’s silent, not thinking, but avoiding the question.

“Is that what you’re doing here?” Phil asks him again. They’re sat too close. Dan’s painfully aware of it, but he does nothing to remedy his situation.

“I don’t know.” Dan swallows sea air and looks down at the ocean.

“Would you mind getting over him?” Phil asks, his voice is soft, like stardust against Dan’s skin. He’s comfortable. Too comfortable for sense it seems.

Dan laughs, and leans back against the rocks. Phil steadies him with his arms so he doesn’t slip. He doesn’t pull his arm away from around Dan’s waist. Dan doesn’t ask him to.

“Would I mind?” He laughs again, but softly, carefully, and only with his mouth. Because suddenly everything’s about mouths, about lips, about drowning in the fucking ocean and learning how to breathe underwater. “I’d fucking love to.”

Phil wraps up a present with that smile. He holds Dan like the ocean hugs the shore. If he ever let go, Dan feels mad enough to trust him to always come back again.

“Can I kiss you?” Phil asks. “Or have I read this all wrong?”

Dan’s heart lives and dies a thousand lifetimes inside of his chest. He doesn’t answer. His mouth tastes dry. He doesn’t have the words for it. He kisses him instead.

He kisses Phil, and he tastes like sunsets, and the ocean, and sweet, but not too sweet cocktails, made in a bright neon pink colour. He tastes like the best bad decision Dan has ever made. His veins fizzle with adrenaline.

“Come back home with me.” He whispers against Phil’s throat. He doesn’t know whether he means England or the villa. He doesn’t suppose it matters. Maybe it’s been minutes. Maybe it’s been hours. Phil looks at him like he’d readily agree to both — like he’d agree to everything.

Phil stumbles over the step up to the gate. Dan laughs at his bruised elbow and pretty pout from where he fell into the wall, but he uses it as an excuse to hold him all the way inside.

The lights are off. Dan doesn’t care if they were on. Dan doesn’t care if every empty possession in his parent’s holiday home can see him. Maybe he wants them to see him. Maybe he wants the world to see him. Fucking this boy. Fucking the pretty boy from behind the bar. And maybe loving him a little too.

“Dan.” Phil says his name as he stares up at the ceiling. 

Their skin is stained with sweat. The sheets are off and bunched messily around their ankles. Dan doesn’t know what to say, so he just breathes.

“Can you turn the ceiling fan on?” Phil asks him.

Dan reaches for the switch by the side of his bed. The whirring of the fan blades dissects their silence. He falls asleep to the noise. He feels young all over again. It’s not such a bad thing, to be alive, he thinks.

His mouth tastes like sex. He wakes up with Phil next to him. His mouth tastes like mornings and bad breath and beautiful boys, and fucking sweat, and god, Phil is using his en-suite, and he’s left the door open. Who leaves the door open? Especially only after staying over that first night.

Dan sits on the end of his bed in the early morning and decides that Phil is either unafraid beyond measure, or just a fucking idiot. It has to be one of them; he feels it within his chest.

Phil smiles at him as he walks out. And kisses him on the cheek when Dan gets up and walks past. He’s unafraid. Dan decides, then in that moment.

He wrestles with the fancy coffee machine, while Phil sits at the breakfast bar. He insists he’s fine, but Dan’s trying like he’s never tried before, and he wants someone to witness it.

He wins in the end, but the coffee still tastes like shit. They abandon their mugs on the kitchen side and take their breakfast first to the sofas, before deciding that the house is too hot entirely. They then take it outside, and sit by the pool, with their legs in the chlorinated water and Dan pinches his skin like he’s not sure anything’s real anymore.

Phil finishes his breakfast and jumps straight in the pool, with his shorts on. Dan looks at shirt left in heap by his plate. His eyes are pitiful. Phil smiles at him from the other side of the pool. He’s daring him to get in with him. And in that moment, Dan is unafraid too, or maybe just stupid. Maybe they are both idiots, but maybe this is how love begins. Dan doesn’t suppose there’s so much difference.

Phil shrieks like a teenage girl when Dan splashes him with water, but he can hold his breath underwater for the longest. They’re both too competitive for their own good, so they spend hours in the pool, forgetting the world, like the world is meant only to be forgotten.

Dan pulls himself onto the pool side in the midday sun, and supposes none of this was such a bad idea at all. It’s a strange kind of feeling — realising that he’d never been in the wrong.

“I have to go for my shift in a few hours.” Phil tells him. He’s still in the water, resting his head in his arms against the side.

Dan bites his lip. “Come back here after. Or maybe I’ll come down to the bar. Whatever. Both. Maybe. Both. Fuck it.”

Phil smiles at him.

“Fuck it.” He repeats back at him, and gets out of the water. He kisses Dan on the lips. Unafraid. Stupid. A plethora of things.

Dan spends a little time alone, after Phil leaves, wandering around the villa, clearing up the mess he’s made over the past few days. At last, he turns his phone back off of airplane mode. He doesn’t look at it just yet, but leaves it out on the kitchen counter to stumble upon in an hour or two. The real world isn’t something he can avoid anymore. It isn’t something he needs to.

Finally, he makes his way out to the balcony, to look out at the sea, and make out the shitty little bar on the beach.

He wonders many sparks make it out to the ocean when he overlooks the sea. He wonders how many flames burned out and died. He wonders how many live despite the water. How many hearts stop sinking and finally learn how to swim.

His mouth tastes like Phil. It is a Sunday afternoon. He’s more in love with the world than he’s ever been. He feels like himself again.

Everything else feels just like a memory, like a photograph, like a secret, kept in the back of a drawer somewhere. It’s a truth he’ll revisit eventually, when the moon comes home, and the silence is at high tide, risen up to his ankles. 

But for now, he just wants to live. And that isn’t such an awful thing at all.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading, kudos and comments would be much appreciated !! i really fucking fell in love with this one, and this whole au, and there's such a strong sense of atmosphere and feeling in this, for me at least. idk maybe i'd write something else for this au, if people want that, i'll find some time


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